The Verge published this spam article about the “best printers of 2024” to demonstrate how terrible Google’s search results are. It now appears as the top non-sponsored post if you search “best printer” on Google.

I love a good, informative troll.

  • merthyr1831@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    Google used to list sites with backlinks highly, it was their first ever search algorithm iirc. Once people learned you could game that by planting useless backlinks, Google realised it was a bad idea.

    Somehow, they’ve reinvented this all over again with parasite SEO that fundamentally works the same way. All they did was add some “domain ranking”. Now, unreliable-but-popular sites coughredditcough will always score highly regardless of quality, because Google deemed them superior.

    • psycho_driver@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      reddit is a very good search resource though because it has 15 years of real people giving real information. I imagine reddit from here on out will be going hard on the enshitification train so it’s value as a search resource will rapidly decline.

      • turmacar@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        Anything post-2022, and probably post-2020, is suspect on Reddit because it became abundantly clear how steerable it was and how easy to generate sales as long as you didn’t do anything too “suspicious”. Current ‘ad guides’ tell advertisers not to link things because just saying the name reads as more authentic.

        Before that it was legitimately people discussing, e.g., the best flashlight for x-y-z purposes. But a decent amount of old stuff has been gutted by people deleting their posts/accounts.